Recommended Games

Daily Ticker

Why Millennials Will Never Be Happy

Some call the group of Americans born between the late 1970s and mid-1990s "millennials." Others prefer Gen Y or even the "me" generation. Whatever you call them, they're changing the workforce for good and by 2025, 3 out of every 4 workers will be one of them.

Tim Urban, co-founder of popular blog Wait But Why and a serial entrepreneur, has coined a new term for the 80 million young Americans: GYPSYs, Or Gen YProtagonists and Special Yuppies. Urban wrote a blog about this group called "Why Gen Y Yuppies Are Unhappy" which has resonated with both young and old folk, reaching nearly 2 million Facebook likes.

The blog explains why millennials will always expect too much from the workplace -- they’re wildly ambitious but also a bit delusional about expectations. Gen Y was raised with the idea that if they work hard enough they can be the president, an astronaut, or even a ballerina -- that they can do anything they set their minds to. This combination of wild ambition and thinking they’re “special” is a recipe for unhappiness, Urban tells The Daily Ticker.

Urban also explains the phenomenon of Facebook-envy. When millennials check their Facebook pages, they’re bombarded with only the highlights of their friends' lives. Even Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, admits to being guilty of Facebook marketing. “I’m a marketer, and sometimes I almost can’t take it out of my personal life," she tells The New York Times. "I’ve had friends call me and say, ‘Your life looks so amazing.’ And I tell them: ‘I’m a marketer; I’m only posting the moments that are amazing.’”

These problems paired with the hard realities of graduating into a recession are bad news for America's younger generations, argues Urban.

“I think that everybody expects to do better than their parents…the problem is baby boomers did very well in a very prosperous economy," he says. "Now...you have to be famous and recognized and appreciated and do something groundbreaking and make your mark in a very special way. Not only is that an insanely ambitious goal but you also have a terrible economy…expectations are so wildly off. The economy needs [millennials] to humble their expectations."